Terminus, on until Dec. 9, launches new off-Mirvish season of experimental theatre

“All the world’s a stage,” isn’t just a famous quote to Mitchell Cushman, it’s a theatrical mission statement.

The artistic director of Outside the March, the city’s most peripatetic theatre company, has staged plays in hacker dens, kindergarten classrooms and — from now through Dec. 9 — on the stage of the Royal Alexandra Theatre, where Terminus is launching the new off-Mirvish season of experimental theatre.

What’s so strange about doing a play on the stage of the Royal Alex? Well in this case, the cast and the audience are both on the stage, with the audience sitting where the actors usually perform, while the actors perform on the very edge of the stage, with their backs to the theatre.

Not a usual kind of staging, but then Terminus is not a usual kind of play. Written by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, it’s a series of interconnected monologues from three characters whereby a mundane evening rapidly escalates into the otherworldly, before catapulting into the apocalyptic.

It’s blunt, shocking, amazing and impossible to forget. That’s what Ava Jane Markus felt when she saw its initial production in Dublin back in 2007.

“I bought the script that night at the theatre and said to myself, ‘I absolutely have to do this show someday.’ And now, five years later, I am.”

Markus and fellow cast members Maev Beaty and Adam Kenneth Wilson form a unique trio who commit to the play totally, but it’s thanks to Cushman and his gift for appropriately imaginative staging that the whole thing flies like it does.

“Ava had told me about this script, but I was having trouble figuring out how we could stage it,” Cushman says.

“Then I sat in at Stratford on a kind of guerrilla theatre production of another play by the same author, Howie the Rookie, that David Ferry staged at midnight around a campfire. It was one of the most memorable theatrical experiences I’d ever had and I started thinking of what we could do with Terminus.”

The final result had real artistic sizzle to it, but there’s also method to Cushman’s madness.

“We want more and more to create pieces that feel like an event, not just another show you’d go to. I believe these are the pieces that stick with people. For example, when we did Mr. Marmalade at SummerWorks in 2011, there were 40 other shows running, but we were ‘the one that’s in the kindergarten classroom.’

“The hardest thing is to be a young company and get noticed,” Cushman observes. “It’s not enough to put on another production of Glengarry Glen Ross in a conventional theatre. I know. I tried that.”

Markus concurs. “But the wonderful thing about Terminus is that as soon as people walk into the room, they’re engaged.”

One of those people was John Karastamatis, the director of communications for Mirvish Productions. He went to see the show’s SummerWorks run this year at Factory Theatre and told Cushman how much he liked it. As he was climbing on his bike to leave he said, “We should do it on the stage of the Royal Alex for 200 people.”

Cushman laughs, “I didn’t know if he was serious or not, but I emailed him the next day. And then David Mirvish came to see it. But that was the night we had a medical emergency in the audience and the show never finished. I thought that was it, but it wasn’t.

“I never knew they were thinking of this whole off-Mirvish season and just looking for the right show to launch it. And so it transitioned from a joke to something that really happened.”

Markus is thrilled to do the play again in any venue but says the stage of the Royal Alex is especially exciting. “You can’t drop out for a second performing this play. You’re exploring an underworld and an inner-world, with all the personal insecurities the three characters are battling. It’s an amazing struggle.”

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